Mid Level Gaming/Work Laptop

happynoobing

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Jan 10, 2012
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18,510
1. What is your budget?
< $1000 before tax

2. What is the size of the notebook that you are considering?
14"~15" (including 15.6")

3. What screen resolution do you want?
Doesn't matter

4. Do you need a portable or desktop replacement laptop?
More towards portable, but not looking for those ultrabooks.

5. How much battery life do you need?
Not really worried about battery life, 5~6hrs of normal web surfing would be fine

6. Do you want to play games with your laptop? If so then please list the games that you want to with the settings that you want for these games. (Low,Medium or High)?
I plan to play some medium games (maybe low by today's standards) with this laptop, mostly older games: Age of Empires 3, Medieval 2 Total War, Civ5, Starcraft 2, etc.

7. What other tasks do you want to do with your laptop? (Photo/Video editing, Etc.)
Will be using it for my grad school later this year, so probably some Solidworks, Photoshop. Will be installing Ubuntu on it with OpenCV

8. How much storage (Hard Drive capacity) do you need?
500GB+

9. If you are considering specific sites to buy from, please post their links.
Neweggs: http://www.newegg.ca/
NCIX: http://ncix.com/
CanadaComputers: http://www.canadacomputers.com/

10. How long do you want to keep your laptop?
2~3 years

11. What kind of Optical drive do you need? DVD ROM/Writer,Bluray ROM/Writer,Etc ?
DVD ROM/Writer

12. Please tell us about the brands that you prefer to buy from them and the brands that you don't like and explain the reasons.
Prefer Lenovo or Asus, but this is more based on the look of their laptops

13. What country do you live in?
Canada

14. Please tell us any additional information if needed.
Definitely need to have an i5 or i7 CPU.

I had looked into the Lenovo U400, but it seems that its graphics is quite weak (love its design though... can't have the best of both worlds :pfff: ). It also doesn't have a VGA port, which I would prefer to have (but not a requirement).

Since I'll be doing some OpenCV vision related work, it would be nice to have some sort of firewire capability (either a firewire port or an express card slot). I understand that this requirement might be difficult to fulfill with laptops these days since I have yet to find any with it, so this is not absolutely necessary.
 
Hello happynoobing;

It's going to be tough to find a mid-level gaming laptop with Firewire or Express card too.
And yes, the Radeon HD 6470 is a fairly weak gaming card.

In your price range:
Lenovo Y570 with Core i7-2670QM and GT 555M graphics @ $CAD879
 

happynoobing

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Jan 10, 2012
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It seems that the lenovo Y570 and the i7 Asus have very similar specs. In terms of quality from the 2 manufacturers, which one would you recommend?
 

happynoobing

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Jan 10, 2012
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18,510
What about 14" laptops? Any suggestions? I've been looking at the lenovo y470 and the asus U46sv? I'm curious about their keyboard and touchpad quality. The lenovo has better specs but the asus looks better. How's the gaming performance of the asus?